Sakuteiki: Visions of the Japanese Garden
The Sakuteiki answers such questions as “How do I build an island in the Pine Bark Style?” and “In what direction should I plant a sakaki tree?”
Or, channeling Tony Soprano, “What does it mean to have ducks in my pool?”
The answer: “If the pond is continually inhabited by waterfowl, then the master of the house will know peace and happiness.”
The 10th-century Sakuteiki is among the oldest surviving guides to gardening or, more precisely, the Japanese art of “setting stones.”
Written by an unknown noble, the pointers touch on the mechanics, the spirituality, and the taboos of gardening in the early Heian period. (The Heian court, later immortalized in The Tale of Genji and The Pillow Book, made an art of everything from passing notes to playing hacky-sack.)
Fleshing out the short treatise is a five-chapter introduction on nature and court life in Kyoto, the art of geomancy, Buddhism and more, as well as detailed footnotes.
We learn that waterfalls and their two adjoining stones represent the Buddhist trinity. The notion that all water should run eastward comes from the Eastern Flow of Buddhism: from its beginnings in the Indus Valley through China, Korea, and Japan.
Strict taboos lend the art a sense of urgency. A misplaced stone can spread illness or death, while one placed according to the author’s “secret teachings” can ward off devils.
Many of these teachings concern the proper height of waterfalls, the way to prop up a standing stone, and so on. Yet even in the mechanics of gardening, there’s poetry in the names of garden types and the descriptions of vistas:
“The Mist island, when seen from across the pond, should appear as trailing mist in a light green sky, in two and three layers, fine, indefinite, here and there disconnected. Again, no stones, no trees. Only a white sandy beach.”
Sakuteiki: Visions of the Japanese Garden. Translated by Marc Peter Keane and Jiro Takei (Tuttle, 2001).
